I’ve stopped understanding things.
No longer can I read books, because all the words seem to tumble off the pages when I pick it up. Nor can I see the moon and realize that it is a celestial eye watching over me. I cannot process that gravity will plunge me to the cement when I jump, or that I’ll be cold when I step onto the balcony without a jacket, or that the blood leaking into the sidewalk cracks is actually my own. I may know the general logic—that grass is green because of chlorophyll, that a blade will cut you if you run your finger along it, that it is bright during the day and dark during the night—but if you think I get it, you’re as wrong as my calculus homework.
I can’t recall if I’ve ever actually understood anything, or if I’ve just been nodding obediently to get by. The teachers always did hate students that asked too many questions. I could’ve been a thin-legged spider, gliding along the water’s surface without the strength or weight to ever break through the surface tension.
Or, it could be that everyone chose a different language while I was asleep. That must be why everyone seems to be referencing something just out of my grasp, like they’re pointing at a balloon in a sky residing in my blind spot. And when I speak, it’s in an anachronistic dialect that’s grating on the ears, because everyone else has evolved while I’ve stayed stagnant. They’ve conspired into a new kind of dialogue, with phonetics aligned to a formula they can’t tell me, and it’s beautiful. The syllables are rounder, like perfect circles, and the letters can only be written in cursive, which I’ll never be able to decipher, and the mouth shapes are picturesque, contorted into positions my tongue can’t reach. It’s beautiful without me.
It’s hard to see numbers and letters on a computer screen and think that they translate to anything meaningful. Those abstract shapes illuminated by blue light—they’re sources of information, supposedly. They tell me if I’m smart in my classes, what’s happening in the world, whether or not I have connections with other people. There’s just too much that I can ask but never get a real answer to, and that’s why I still don’t know if I can trust what’s on the screens anymore. I still don’t even know if what I read means the same thing in my language as it does in the new language. It is all evident of a greater suspicion that I am, in fact, not in the same reality I was in before I fell asleep.
Lately, I’ve been haunted by déjà vu instead of memories. With that, comes my inability to conjure past knowledge. I can’t know if I’ve seen something before, I can only feel as if I’ve seen it. I keep watching scenes that I swear I’ve analyzed before, yet the analysis, once summoned, draws an underlined blank. Nothing I’ve experienced from the long-term past can save me from a humiliating confession when I’m challenged: “I don’t know.” Truly, I don’t, and can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t.
You’ll have to explain to me, in much simpler terms, what you mean when you say you care.
Say words that I can understand.